NaNoWriMo; My Assessment

Today’s blog text format is brought to you by somebody who, for once, has written his blog post ahead of time and not directly onto his website. There is a good reason why I am able to write this post in advance, too: see, I completed NaNoWriMo.

That’s right. My new work-in-progress YA novel passed 50,000 words on Sunday, November 25, exactly one month before Christmas. Whether that’s significant or not, I don’t know, but it does feel like a gift to not have to bend my schedules, making them fit my lengthy 2000-words-per-day sessions around my heaven-knows-how-many-words-I’m-writing-for-the-newspaper-already job.

My regimen paid off, though (and it turns out I can cram in about 500 words of fiction writing during lunch breaks). So, now that I’m here on the other side of the month’s writing marathon, I expect some of you are wondering what my thoughts are about this whole NaNoWriMo lark, not that any of you have asked.

Well…for me, it was near-equal parts hate and love, to be honest.

Let’s start with the hate.

Last year I complained about being a slow writer. Today, on the other side of 50,000 words, that still holds true—and that’s even when I’m biting back my impulse to look over previous paragraphs to get a feel for where I am, to correct typos, to rearrange…everything, et cetera. It took effort to plunk myself down in my chair, merely glance at my last sentence, and hammer away at the keyboard straight from there. You can’t build up momentum; you have to take off sprinting from the start line, and I like to pause and think of exactly how I’m going to scale the next hill. At the end of it all, I’m still quite the pause-and-carefully-consider-the-next-sentence kind of writer. I make Flash the sloth from the movie “Zootopia” look like a court stenographer on some days.

But—and here we transfer over to the stuff I like—there were days when the story just flew along.

I loved those days. I can think of two in particular where I had such writing momentum going that I overshot my daily writing goal by 500 words each day. (In the spirit of Andy Weir’s book “The Martian”, I’m changing the term “words per day” to “Doom-iguanas”, and I don’t care if it’s hardly shorter.) Anyway, those two days gave me a nice 1000-word cushion I held all the way until the last two days of my 50,000-word stretch—the busy Thanksgiving weekend. Even though I dropped back to 1500 Doom-iguanas, I finished five days early. Now I’m writing this.

I’m continuing to write my NaNoWriMo project; turns out I might actually have a good concept here, and I’m still engaged with everybody in the story. It’s soft sci-fi (I think), but it has its wonderfully nerdy moments when it’s really hard for me to remember that 20 pages of straight expositing can be dull. My Evil Notebook of Writing has pages and pages dedicated to plot details, worldbuilding notes, and other stuff I don’t want to forget.

I love the story I’ve kicked into gear, and I plan to write it all the way through—even though I’ve dropped back to 1000 Doom-iguanas now. And that’s the big reason I’m grateful to NaNoWriMo: it gave me a reason to write the novel. I’d had the book’s concept stewing in my head for a while (since July 29, 2017, to be exact—I wrote it down in that Evil Notebook of Writing), and it was great to have an excuse to get the idea up off its couch and make itself useful. After all, I wrote my first manuscript when I told myself, “Hey, you’ve got some free time; why not write that book idea you have?” This time, I told myself, “Hey, you haven’t done this writer’s rite of passage yet; why not use that other book idea you have?”

Let me tell you, this trip reminded me how much fun it is to work on an original story.

To conclude, will I do this again next year?

…Maybe. Maybe not. With this under my belt, I believe I have the right to excuse myself on the grounds being a NaNoWriMo veteran—with only one tour of service, but that’s still something.

On the other hand, another story idea might pop up. We’ll see.

Now I’ve got to get back to writing.